Housing rents in Germany have been rising for several years. Especially in major cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich, the increases have recently been higher than the German average growth rate of rents that makes up roughly two percent. The German government would like to respond to this...

The crisis in the European currency area is not over yet. Although the situation in the financial markets is currently relatively calm, the economic crisis appears to be bottoming out in most countries. Nevertheless, fundamental design flaws in the Monetary Union continue to exist. If these are...

Due to a weak winter half-year, the German economy will only grow by 0.4 percent in 2013. However, the economic slowdown seems to be coming to an end now; growth in 2014 is expected to be above average at 1.8 percent. The global economy is experiencing an upswing again; growth in many emerging...

The German economy is following a moderate upward trend. At 0.7 per cent, growth in the second quarter was strong compared to the first quarter, but this development was overstated by special effects. In the course of the next quarters production accelerates. In the coming year, growth will...

The German economy will grow by 1.5 percent this year. In the coming year, the increase in GDP will be somewhat higher at 1.8 percent. The jobless rate will be 6.7 percent this year but it will rise by three-tenths of a percentage point in the coming year. Inflation will remain moderate in both...

Speculative house price increases potentially mean major real and financial risks and have increasingly been the subject of current public debate in Germany. Recent events in countries such as the US or Spain have demonstrated the negative impact that the bursting of speculative price bubbles...

After a period of stagnation that lasted for almost two decades, German house prices began to grow at an accelerated pace since late 2010. Real house prices that even had been declining in 2000-2008 started to climb up steeply from the second half of 2010, followed by a recovery of construction...

In this paper, the authors construct a unique data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected between January and May 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using the resulting sample of...

The use of log-transformed data has become standard in macroeconomic forecasting with VAR models. However, its appropriateness in the context of out-of-sample forecasts has not yet been exposed to a thorough empirical investigation. With the aim of filling this void, a broad sample of VAR models...

Do timing and time diversification improve the average investor's stock market return? Contrary to literature's scenario of wealthy investors, average investors invest each month over life. Many purchases prevent investors from buying at peak, but horizons decrease, giving latter investments...